Pierre Mukeba

Pierre Mukeba’s first drawings and paintings were made on bed sheets with indelible brush pens and pencils. Within a few months of commencing an art practice, the Congolese-born artist started to incorporate fabrics sourced from Africa. He works on thin unstretched canvas, on a small table in his bedroom, and yet from such a restricted space he can produce works up to five metres high. His drawn lines are often sewn over while large areas of canvas are left raw.

Mukeba was born in Bukavu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Moving to South Australia with his family in 2006, he began to paint the extraordinary experiences and people from his childhood. Sometimes themes of brutality, violence, political and economic exploitation emerge and at other times memories of family proliferate.